Call out

The inventor of the verse form known as the clerihew, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, had a way with this seemingly simple vehicle. Take this example: ‘Sir Christopher Wren / Said, ‘I am going to dine with some men. / If anybody calls / Say I am designing St Paul’s.’

My interest just now is with call. Bentley meant ‘call at a house’. The default meaning now, I think, is ‘to telephone’, a usage that has largely displaced ring or phone.

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David Butterfield

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But call is also very productive of phrasal verbs: call off, call for, call in, call on, call upon or call out. Call out is fashionable at the moment, when virtue signalling and denunciation are habits being grafted on to daily life, like eating sushi at work out of a cardboard box or stumbling about on the pavement looking at a phone.